Synopsis
by Dear Aunt Elladora
Summary: Ellie Nash harshly realizes in her Latin class how much of a bad thing verb tense can be. Short drabble-like Ellie angst with a Latin (the language) theme.


In the stuffy Latin classroom it's as if you've lost against time and found yourself trapped in a memory. Your back squeals against the cold stall door as you slide to the floor, extending your heavy combat boots out in front you, flanking the sides of the foot of the toliet and contrasting against the off-white tiles on the ground. A final thud is heard as the back of your head contacts with the cold metal door and you supress a scream, supress and groan; refrain from verbalizing your angry confusion.

In Latin, you learn your cases and verbs and conjugations. You define your verb tense because of its particular case ending, which is dependant on its conjugation, which you can tell by knowing the endings and the principal parts of the verbs. It is all related and linked and makes you think about how seperated, how far you are from being inside a group.

The nouns in latin don't change from tense to tense, just in the same words no matter the time. _Puella_ is still a nominative girl whether she did the action now or six months ago or will do it in an hour. But you're far too inconsistant to be a noun like that - to stay one way til the end.

You're a nonesense verb that changes through time and is modified by the world around you. That thought helps you to explain your motives in your switch in character. Gone from the pink-wearing, lip-gloss obsessing Eleanor and head first into morbidly dark and eyelined Ellie - shutting your past behind double-locked doors and chainlinking over your broken up heart. What you were is far back home in another providence, buried within your ex-boyfriend's abusive actions and your best friend's death of alchohol poisoning.

What you became, what you are, is a girl with a chip on her shoulder and a grudge against the world. You were running from your past and embraced whatever was thrown at your with a darkened demeanor and bolted the skeletons within your closet. You used Degrassi as your outlet, your escape, your dirt to bury your past within the soils and sins. Parts of you dissapeared when your family car passed the providence line, edging you into a reinvention that you just _can't _take back.

In Latin it's as if the past is never really ignored, for as many present or future tense verbs there are just as many perfect and imperfect. In the latin they're all right, with _bam, bas, bat_ or _i, isti, it _but when you take it to english there's the trouble. A simple verb can come back to bite you in the butt, transforming basics like _amabam _into a menacing thing like _'I was loving.' _You want to escape from that previous action and keep moving, or just hide within the latin and not have to make it into such a complicated thing.

You just want to keep the past in a way not understood by those who haven't studied hard enough, keep the history tied within a dead language instead of into the fast-paced, quick-changing social world. You want to wrap yourself up within a tongue difficult to handle and forget, for a minute, where it is you come from. Most of all, you wish to transfer to Spanish so you can worry about simple things like how to memorize what accents over which letters are pronounced.

But instead, gathering yourself slowly from the floor, you unlock the stall in a quick movement. Catching a glimpse of yourself in the mirror, you wonder if you saw that face when you were in grade seven how loud you would've screamed. Now, it's like your used to it, numbed over time with your acceptence of yourself. You wash your hands, scrubbing as if to scrape of ink or wash blood from your hands - both of which you've done - but now to try to remove the past from these pale hands.

Your door turns the brass knob and then you hear it, the coveted sound, the class bell. In quick minutes the doors have opened and people pour into the hallways, leaving you trapped within the halls. You pull your bag tighter to your chest and weave your way to your next class -- you'll just have to wrestle latin another day.

Tonight your dreams can be littered with synopsises and C Period dread, filled with faces of those you thought you could forget.

* * *

**Author's note: **my bitter reaction to all 16 of the synopsises we had for homework last night. Um, for clarification purposes, I'm only like half way through Latin 2, so my facts are fairly accurate though I might have made an error for you spaztastic latin students to correct. Ellie's past is so uber fantastic I wanna scream. This ALMOST had Chris in it.. _so _close. But if you want some more Ellie-past-ness, info about her "abusive ex-boyfriend" / "best friend dead by alchohol poisoning" read my other fanfiction called _In Memory_. Also some Ellie/Chris-ness there. Anywasy, this may have been confusing because I have the tendency to blab on when I get to talking about latin... and I don't even know if foregin language is a requirement in Canadian schools, or even optional, or if Latin is an option -- but let's pretend it is. :-D Anyway, I've got to be going... I'm in the middle of an RFR fanfic. I'd like to say that's what I'm going to work on, but ... nah, I'm gonna go read some fanfics. Yayy.

**_Review, please?_**

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